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We come here to the only really extraordinary experience in Freud's life. For the circumstances of his infancy, though doubtless important psychologically, were in themselves merely unusual but not extraordinary. Again, for a man of nearly middle age, happily married and having six children,1 to develop a passionate friendship for someone intellectually his inferior, and for him to subordinate for several years his judgement and opinions to those of that other man: this also is unusual, though not entirely unfamiliar. But for that man to free himself by following a path hitherto untrodden by any human being, by the heroic task of exploring his own unconscious mind: that is extraordinary in the highest degree.
The Fliess story is dramatic enough, and so indeed is the minor one of how the world came to know of it. Freud destroyed the letters Fliess had written to him, but Fliess preserved Freud's. Some years after Fliess's death in 1928 his widow sold the packet of 284 extremely private letters, together with the accompanying scientific notes and manuscripts Freud had from time to time sent him, to a bookseller in Berlin, Reinhold Stahl by name. But she sold them under the strict condition that they were not to pass to Freud himself, knowing that he would immediately destroy them. Freud and his wife had both been very fond of Frau Fliess in the early days, but as time passed she became increasingly jealous of the close relations between the two men and did her best—spurred on somewhat by Breuer!— to disrupt them. Ultimately Freud summed her up as a ‘bad woman’, but doubtless she had her point of view. At all events her final thrust was a shrewd one.
Stahl fled to France for a while during the Nazi régime and there in 1937 offered the documents to Mme Marie Bonaparte, who at once perceived their value and acquired them for £100.